


For You, My Love

by Natasja



Category: Ancient Egyptian Religion, Gods Of Egypt (2016)
Genre: Angst, BAMF Hathor, F/M, Hathor feels, Lots of Angst, character exploration, no seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 06:07:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6599803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Natasja/pseuds/Natasja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hathor is the Goddess of Love, but even she is sometimes surprised at the lengths to which some people will go for it. Even her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For You, My Love

 

For all of his faults (and Ra knows there are many), Hathor loves Horus.

She knows he loves her, but she also knows that Love is not always enough. If Horus is to be a king worthy of the name, she cannot always be the one to smooth over the mess he makes due to temper or rash decisions. The role of a queen is to be a balancing counterpoint, not a crutch so that the king can shirk his responsibility, secure in the belief that she will be able to take up the slack.

Isis was able to rule when Osiris was away at war, but she had the assurance that her husband was a capable leader who would support her. For all that she once helped to guide lost souls, Hathor does not have Isis’s steady strength, nor her confidence in Horus’s ability to rule.

Perhaps one day that will change, but for now, Hathor flirts and loves and makes no promises.

* * *

When Set took Horus’s eyes, standing above him ready to deal a mortal blow, Hathor knew that there was no chance of stopping Set. Not at that moment, anyway.

But for Set to be defeated at any other point, Horus needed to live.

Horus would not understand, having even less of a grip on subtlety than he did on his temper. He would see it as betrayal, and would hate her for it. But her actions would allow Horus to live, to recover and to eventually make things right.

For her love’s survival, Hathor could endure anything.

She screamed the name of Osiris’s murderer, kneeling in a submission that was no such thing, meeting his eyes directly.

Hathor’s power lay in her eyes and her voice, and she focused all her strength on a single message, not daring to tip him off by speaking directly. _Let Horus live. It will be more amusing to watch him suffer. He is no threat now. Hathor is yours. It will do no harm to let Horus live._  

Set paused, his blade only inches from Horus’s heart, a lustful smile on his lips. Hathor managed to conceal her shudder, pasting on an expression that she hoped conveyed desire.

Hathor knew what he had in mind, but she could endure.

Every time the battle against the rebelling gods suffered a setback, Hathor distracted Set before he could consider the merits of killing Horus, just in case. 

When Set won a victory, Hathor took him to her bed, banishing all thoughts of compounding his triumph by adding Horus’s head on a spike.

Hathor was a prisoner, for all that her cage was a gilded one. Every moment was a constant struggle to keep up the act, because faltering for even a moment could result in her death. Guarded constantly by two goddesses who hated her, feigning adoration for a god whose very touch she despised, and almost certainly earning herself Horus’s unending spite… there were times that Hathor wondered if death would not be a kinder fate.

But Hathor acts out of love, and Love endures.

* * *

Bek and Zaya… it had been a long time since Hathor had seen a love so strong.

The mortal thief trusted his wife’s faith, loved her enough to do what she asked of him, for the merest chance that it would bring her back.

For all the times Horus had exasperated her, Hathor had never been so angry as when she found out that Horus had lied to Bek in order to gain his help, when any fool could tell that Bek would have helped him for the sake of Zaya’s memory, to honour her last wishes.

To so abuse that fragile trust… If Hathor hadn’t agreed that Set needed to be stopped, she would have left Horus floundering in the desert sands, possibly after changing to her animal form and goring him with her horns.

No great cause, no desire for vengence, could ever justify raising a desperate man’s hopes, only to dash them so cruelly. For all his faults, Hathor had never believed that the God she loved could have been so cruel.

* * *

It had been easy, perhaps too easy, for Hathor to offer Bek her bracelet in order to buy Zaya’s passage to the afterlife. With years of being imprisoned as Set’s plaything, with Horus allowing lust for revenge to turn him into someone Hathor did not recognise, and with the world about to be destroyed anyway, an eternity of fighting off demons was almost welcome.

At least she would be doing something productive and useful with her time, rather than sitting around helplessly.

Besides, Horus had rescued her from that fate before, and if he managed to re-discover the man, the leader, that she believes still lurks inside him somewhere, he will do so again.

Hathor believes that, because she is Love, and Love is hope and belief.

Love is worth suffering and dying for.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: OK, at first I really didn’t like Gods of Egypt, partly due to the whitewashing that always annoys me, and mostly due to the way they butchered the entire myth. About the best I could say after the first viewing was that it kept me in suspense. Then, of course, my best friend wanted to see it, and it was her turn to pick the movie. 
> 
> That time, I went in determined to pretend that the characters just happened to coincidentally share names with the main players in one of my favourite myths, and was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. Not to the extent that I enjoyed Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or even Alice in Wonderland, but I didn’t feel that it was a total waste of my money.
> 
> The complex sub-plots were interesting, as were the messages of personal growth and the importance of owning up to and fixing your mistakes. The dialogue could be painful at times, with a bit of a tendency toward monologuing but most of the time it was good, with several one-liners that actually made me laugh.
> 
> Plus, Hathor-Feels.
> 
> Anyway, if you liked it, drop a review letting me know what you think.


End file.
